Challenges in Physician Onboarding

Did you know that physician onboarding delays can cost over $100,000 per week? Onboarding a physician in a hospital can take more than 90 days. A lot of effort goes into recruiting the best physicians. However, an unorganized onboarding process can make them feel uncomfortable leading to turnover.

During the onboarding process, long procedures, such as credentialing, require efforts from multiple departments and external entities. Since these processes are manual with poor coordination, they are both long and excruciating, leading to increased expenditure and turnover for hospitals.

An effective onboarding process will reduce overall recruitment and turnover costs. It will enable improved collaboration and time to productivity for new physicians. Hospitals need a solution that allows physicians to easily access information when needed, with complete the documentation, and provide them with all the support they need.

In this blog, we will explore a solution that will reduce the onboarding time and also improve efficiency. Let’s begin with understanding the process of onboarding a physician.

Challenges Faced During The Onboarding Process

While onboarding a physician, credentialing itself takes over three months. Different steps of onboarding also require involvement of people from different departments or different entities.

The kind of multi-departmental effort this requires is inhibited due to manual, inefficient processes. For instance, the process of obtaining and validating a physician’s documents related to his medical education, criminal or civil legal actions, internship and residency is inefficient. It is difficult for hospitals to automate and orchestrate all these processes across the different departments and other external entities involved.

Moreover, a long process leaves new hires with an unappealing onboarding experience. Without proper orientation, the newly hired physicians may have a high turnover rate. The onboarding process needs to be reinvented, giving physicians a consumer-like experience.

How You Can Reduce Delays And Minimize Turnover

Hospitals should have a single platform for all physicians that includes onboarding and other lifecycle events. This platform should enable them to minimize manual tasks, thereby improving efficiency and reducing delays. It’s imperative that hospitals get a single service delivery platform such as ServiceNow integrated to their system, allowing physicians to focus on treating patients.

Let’s explore how this service delivery platform can help address delays and turnover.

Reducing Delays – Automating and Orchestrating Work

All complex processes and tasks can be automated and orchestrated in the platform by a medical staffing department. Here is a use case of how automation can speed up the process of onboarding:

Through the platform, the new hire physician can easily upload all their documents for credentialing and licensing.

A workflow already in place is triggered by the action. Tasks are automatically allocated to the team responsible for verifying the documents.

The platform allows for automation within other departments like legal, IT, and finance; or even external entities such as Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), state licensing boards and commercial credentialing applications.

The entire process is tracked with complete visibility to the physician.

Notifications and reminders are also automatically sent out through the platform.

With automated workflows in place, the chaos of onboarding can be easily managed to reduce delays.

By integrating a single platform accessible to new hire and existing physicians, you can enable consumer-like service experience for all.

By accessing the platform, the newly hired physicians can seek a personalized, step-by-step guidance for the onboarding process. This way, they always have the right information available to them easily. If they are stuck on any onboarding task, they can seek inline help; thereby enabling them to complete their tasks seamlessly.

The existing physicians can seek assistance regarding continuing education, ongoing trainings, and license revalidation. Like the onboarding process, these processes can also be easily automated and orchestrated with a service delivery platform. These effective self-service options cause little to no disruption for these routine employee tasks.

By ensuring all life cycle events for the physicians are seamless and pain free, you can reduce the turnover rate for your hospital.

Get Started With Automation

Physician onboarding is long, costly and complex. Medical staffing leaders are now recognizing that they can save in every single hire they make. Automating manual onboarding tasks also frees up the physician’s time which improves the quality of patient engagement. You can leverage these benefits if you make your physician onboarding seamless.

You can start by reducing the number of manual tasks and exploring ways to collaborate better. Understand your onboarding processes and figure out how you can automate and orchestrate these tasks across multiple departments and external agencies.

Choose INRY as your implementation partner to leverage service delivery platforms such as the NOW platform by ServiceNow. We work closely to understand the nuances in your onboarding processes. With our experience and expertise, we help you minimize onboarding costs enabling a consumer-like physician onboarding.

Feel free to reach out to us for a quick consultation with one of our experts.